Helios
A multimedia theatre production
Helios is a multimedia theatre production about the Sun, about Alexander Chizhevsky and his ideas.
They came to me at an early stage with a couple of decks and a handful of images. The brief was specific: build a site that would help present the future production to potential partners and secure funding to stage it.
Later the same site was to become the project’s main digital home and its ticketing point.
Context
Usually you can build a site around a product that already exists: there are photographs, video, finished projects, testimonials and other proof.
Here it was the other way round.
The show itself was still to be made, which meant there was almost nothing to show a potential partner. And yet the site had to convey the scale of the production and create the sense of a coherent, considered cultural project — convincing enough to open a conversation about funding.
There were literally only a few source visuals to work from.
Build a convincing image of a project that barely exists yet
Turn scattered information from a set of decks into a full digital image of Helios. The site had to explain the idea of the production, show its artistic scale, and work as a presentation tool for people meeting the project for the first time.
At the same time it was important not to build a temporary “investor site” that would later be thrown away, but to lay the foundation of the future show’s public home.
Approach
Do not dress up a deck — create the feeling of a world that already exists
When the product itself cannot be shown yet, visual communication carries the weight.
I built the site not as a sequence of slides about a future project, but as a first encounter with Helios itself: through scale, composition, movement and atmosphere.
A visitor should feel the character of the production first, and only then get into its content.
Build the site around the idea, not around the material at hand
The number of source images should not decide the quality of the result.
So the existing material became only a starting point. I built the structure, the page composition and the visual system from the story of the project itself and the impression it needed to make.
As a result the site stopped depending on how complete the original deck happened to be.
Create the missing visual material yourself
One of the key tasks was the first screen. It needed an image that sets the scale and the subject at once — and no suitable source image existed.
So I created the central image of the Sun myself in 3D and used it as the basis of the first screen’s visual identity.
That meant the design did not have to bend to a limited set of ready assets: the pieces it needed were made to fit the concept.
Design beyond the task at hand
At first the site was needed above all to present the project and look for funding. But once the production opened, its role would change: it would become the public home of Helios and, later, support ticket sales.
So from the start I treated it not as a single-use presentation page, but as the foundation of the project’s digital presence.
What I did
From a few source decks and a small amount of visual material I built the project’s site:
Separately I created the 3D render of the Sun for the first screen, which became one of the project’s key visual elements.
Outcome
What Helios ended up with was not a deck moved onto the web, but a digital home of its own with its own visual identity — a tool the project could be presented with and used in funding conversations.
I did not follow the project after my part of the work was done, so I do not want to credit the site with investment raised, sales or any other outcome I cannot verify.
For a portfolio the value of this case lies elsewhere: from very limited source material it was possible to assemble a coherent image of a product that did not exist yet, and make it tangible enough to take to an outside audience.
Other cases
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